Early Site of Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show

Two moments from the show's first decade fall outside the plaque. In 1904 Bill Pickett, the African American cowboy and rodeo performer, demonstrated bulldogging at the stock show, according to the show's own history, in a stunt that became the rodeo event now called steer wrestling. In March 1909 the parade included almost forty Comanche and Kiowa men led by Chief Quanah Parker. Pickett, born in Williamson County in 1870, was in 1972 the first African American man inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame.

What the plaque says

Early Site of Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show Fort Worth became an important trading and supply depot in the 1870s for Texas cattlemen driving herds to Northern markets. With the convergence of several railroads here in the 1870s and 1880s stockyard facilities began to appear along the railroad lines. In 1893 Boston investors purchased the Stockyards and organized the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company. The Company held the first livestock show at nearby Marine Creek in March 1896. The show's initial sucess was due mainly to the participation of members of the Texas Cattle Raisers Association (TCRA) whose Annual Meeting in Fort Worth coincided with the Show. The Fort Worth Stock Yards Company built an impressive livestock exchange building in 1903. In 1908, with the help of Armour & Co., Swift & Co., and TCRA members, the National Feeders and Breeders Show opened here in new Coliseum facilities. The show offered a variety of events including a cutting horse competition and a horse show. A Wild West show was added in 1916. The show, renamed Southwestern Exposition and Fat Stock Show in 1918, developed into a premier rodeo, livestock, and exhibition event. In 1943 the facilities were converted for U.S. military purposes and in 1944 the Show relocated to a site in west Fort Worth. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Worth Stockyards — steps away
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 2.5 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 3.1 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 3.6 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• Coliseum — steps away
• Fort Worth Stock Yards Company — steps away
• Fort Worth Stockyards Horse and Mule Barns — 0.2 mi
• Fort Worth Stockyards Hog and Sheep Markets — 0.3 mi